Zombie Spaceship Wasteland - Patton Oswalt

Reads less like a memoir and more like a some memoir pieces glued together with pieces Oswalt couldn't find a home for. This doesn't distract from the read, which is quick and funny and filled with some astute observations (even if they do tend to border on the sentimental) about life in the suburbs.  A good piece about being a stand-up in Surrey, BC in 1993 ends the book, and the title piece about geek culture leaves a warm smile.

The Unamed - Joshua Ferris

At the start, Tim is a lawyer in New York with the usual trappings - a pretty but bored wife, an alienated daughter, a too big house - and the unusual problem of losing control over his body and compelled to walk until he collapses.  No cause or name can be found for this condition, and similar to mental illness or addiction, the unamed warps his life. Plot lines are raised and dropped and the story, somewhat disappointingly, goes in a straight line from start to finish. Any expectations of salvation or redemption are dashed halfway through, and unlike Then We Came To The End, the ending fails to offer any satisfaction or any relief.

The First Real David Foster Wallace Documentary

If you consider yourself a serious reader of literary fiction, then you have to have an opinion on David Foster Wallace. You need not have read Infinite Jest, though I suggest you do. Or at least try. I'm toying with the idea of re-reading it this year - stretch it out over the year, read it in sections, come back to it.

At any rate, there's a documentary out on DFW:

From Flavorwire:

If you’re a reader, a writer or even just a member of the television saturation generation, it’s worth a listen, and if you’re a fan of Wallace, the program may tug at your heartstrings, suggesting what might have been, but celebrating the man as he was. As Don DeLillo tells Ward, “I can’t think of anyone quite like him, at all… Wallace stands alone.” Click through to hear the documentary in its entirety.


Endnotes: David Foster Wallace from georgelazenby on Vimeo.

Learning How To Write

If you want to learn how to write, put your ass in a chair and do it. Instead of taking a writing course, read these books instead:

1. The introduction of a fictional landscape

How to bring up the curtain on a narrative setting. Two classic passages:

- The first chapter of Hardy's The Return of the Native
- The opening of EM Forster's A Passage To India

2. Narrative economy

How to get a story going and introduce your protagonists with maximum speed and efficiency, while developing the plot and establishing character and motivation:

- The opening chapter of Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon
- The opening pages of DH Lawrence's Women in Love
- The first two pages of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

3. The joy of dialogue

How to convey character and situation in fictional speech:

- Almost any passage from Beckett's Waiting for Godot
- Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

4. The magic of tone

How to make your voice heard on the page, to mesmerise the reader:

- Lorrie Moore's story "Vissi D'arte" (actually, almost anything by Lorrie Moore illustrates this)
- JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
- Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

5. Pace

How to get started, at top speed:

- Act I of Macbeth
- Virginia Woolf's Orlando
- Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island

6. Impact

How to grab the reader's attention and hold it by the scruff of the neck:

- Graham Greene's "The Destructors"
- Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song
- Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

7. The only rule is that there are no rules

How to defy gravity in prose and still come out a winner:

- Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy
- Melville's Moby Dick
- Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

From the Guardian

The End of The Big Box Book Store

Remember 10 years ago and everyone was fretting about the death of the independent book store because the large book retailers were gobbling up space? But also remember that if you actually cared about books, you always liked shopping at the independent book store as opposed to the large retailer? Turns out you were right.

From Salon: How Borders Lost Its Soul

"About 10 years ago, Borders opened a store in Hyde Park, less than a mile from 57th Street Books. It's on this week's extinction list. So it turns out that after all the Op-Ed fretting about neighborhoods being swallowed by commercial behemoths, there are neighborhoods where an independent bookstore served the local market better than Borders."


Read more at Salon

The War Against Cliche - Martin Amis

The earlier essays are better, filled with the energy of the angry young man he once was, and it would have been more entertaining to read more negative reviews. A writer always makes a poor book reviewer for the writer has been there, knows the late nights staring at the blank page, the early morning gloom that sets in when a re-reading is needed.

Good pieces on Ballard and Burroughs, plus a few British writers I'm not that familiar with. His cultural criticisms are sharp - more of those would have been welcome - and his fondness that verges on idolatry for Nabokov is a bit much.

The Innocents Abroad - Mark Twain

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts"
Travelling on the first cruise ship ever, a young Mark Twain recounts his experiences through Europe and (what is now called) The Middle East, skewering all that he sees before him. Fun to read for the very non-politically correct observations of the natives (most of which still hold true today) and of the fellow passengers, the book veers off into Twain retelling Biblical history in the later half, as the group tromps around the Holy Land.

Bad Science - Ben Goldacre

Too pat to state that this book should be required reading for all high school science students (and perhaps more importantly, high school science teachers) but it is one of those books that casts a harsh light on some dark nonsense. He argues for science, of all things, critical thinking, statistical analysis and other tools for understanding how things work. Detoxification rituals get a good examination (that brown muck that you see in the detoxic foot bath is actually rust) as do nutrionists, homeopaths and big pharma. (Just because a medicine is better than a placebo doesn't mean it's all that good - it should be better than medicine already in use).

The darkest chapter is the one that wasn't included in the UK version of the book  because of a lawsuit. Matthis Rath convinced the South African government to forgo administrating HIV/AIDS medicine in lieu of vitamin treatments, a decision that costed an untold amount of lives and an example of just how dangerous all this nonsense can be.

Super Sad True Love Story

Twenty minutes into the future and America is a place is owned by its Chinese creditors and no one does work anymore, working in Retail, Media or Credit. Lives are streamed by the minute and kindergartners watch Internet porn. Our hero Lenny Abramov is a throw-back to a distant past when people actually read books and cared about them, and he works for a company that wants you to live forever. He falls in love with Eunice Park,  a child of Korean immigrants who knows no other world than the one of IM and onion skin pants, who finds Lenny's devotion appealing but his physical unattractiveness repellent.

It all falls apart and it is revealed that Lenny's diary and Eunice's emails/IMs that tell the story have become cultural artifacts themselves, reproduced over the decades as streaming dramas. As with all good satire, it hits a little too close to home.